Early urbanization in the Gabrovo textile industry region in Bulgaria. Women’s labour mobility

Abstrakt

The article traces the process of transformation and the stages through which women’s labour mobility in the Gabrovo region passed. If in the pre-modern era seasonal work outside the home was linked to the agrarian cycle, when girls from the mountain villages went down to the fields in the harvest seasons (a journey called “going to Romanya”), then in the years of early modernization they were employed in the Gabrovo weaving factories as workers, and some of them became servants with the rich Gabrovo families. The entrenched development of the textile industry in Gabrovo in the first half of the 20^th century led to a radical change in the life attitudes and labour migration strategies of girls from the mountain villages of the Gabrovo region. It was also a major catalyst for cultural changes in the villages in the decades between the two world wars.